Behind the Façades in France: What expats and the mainstream media (French and American alike) fail to notice (or fail to tell you) about French attitudes, principles, values, and official positions…

Friday, March 15, 2013

A Pope from… the "Southern Hemisphere"?!

Plantu's take on the (s)election of Franciscus I to the papal office is to give the event a definite anti-racist bent of the (habitual) inane variety.

You've heard (or read) of Francis I being the first pope from South (or Latin) America, the first pope from the Americas (in the plural), the first pope from the New World, indeed the first pope from outside of Europe.

Well, what take does Plantu take on that? He calls Francis the first pope from the… Southern Hemisphere, with the world's downtrodden (all Southerners and most if not all "colored") all joining in a rush of joy and song, as if the world is only, or mainly, divided between the evil rich Northerners (look at the other — clueless, joyless, and heartless — "insider" cardinals in Plantu's cartoon) and the poor innocent victims of the South. Thus, the poor Southerners, arrive in triumph to see one of their own kin, one of their protectors, finally in power. (Because "insider" popes like Benedict XVI and John Paul II, you realize, had not an iota of love for them — well, certainly not for those rotten Southerners…)

I guess that all this Southern unity of the downtrodden will be news for Paraguay and all its neighbors, as well as the Hutus and the Tutsis, and I could probably come up with many other examples, if I didn't want to go to bed now…

In addition, Plantu has obviously not heard the theory that in turning to Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the (mainly Italian) cardinals of Rome chose deliberately chose a man, even if (Latin) American, of Italian extraction.

Incidentally, check out
Plantu's previous take on the Vatican, before the choice was known:

For the left (those nuanced souls, those deep thinkers), when everything in the world doesn't boil down to racism, it all boils down to sexism.